Do you already know some French Canadians? The best and most fun way to learn a language is by talking with people. If you know someone who speaks a language you want to learn and they're willing to struggle through talking with you, pick that language.

In an unfettered marketplace, what stops a dominant player from introducing fetters?

I think it's OK to still hate. Kissing ass while smirking because you're soooo smart is still kissing ass. And Apple was part of putting Trump into office.

When I read your message, I get the impression that you think of "The Government" as this independent actor. I see it as a system that is primarily controlled by wealthy people. Either directly or through their funding advertisements (including astroturfing/bot-farms) to promote what they want.

So the larger companies do get government assistance... because they are the government. And this isn't some kind of weird coincidence. It's fundamental to capitalism's operation. You can't have a system that's based on capital and then have it be unbiased towards entities who have vastly more capital!

Their "real" job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.

Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it's invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of "he's not working very hard so he doesn't deserve the money."

socialized capitalism

I think I understand your complaint, but I'd say "free market" rather than "capitalism". But regardless of what we call it, it doesn't actually exist unless you have a more powerful external system regulating it.

Start with a truly free-market capitalist system. One company manages to temporarily pull ahead (through luck and skill). The rational thing for the company to do isn't "make better products" (that's hard) but "destroy competing companies" (much easier). And the end-product would be that the company becomes a government so it can force consumers to pay.

So I'd argue that socialized capitalism (which I'm picturing as a socialist system that permits certain specific free markets and handles the fallout of business failures) is what you actually want.

gcrowdstrike bricks my machine faster and more efficiently than the closed-source version

It sounds like your position is that the loneliness epidemic affects everyone and that there's no reason to talk about it being male loneliness. If so, I believe you're in agreement with the OP and feminist circles: "There is no male loneliness epidemic. It is simply a loneliness epidemic."

However, if you nose around online, you'll find that there are MRA-type circles who are very invested in the idea that it is a specifically-male problem. I interpret the OP img-text as being a reaction against that. To continue the New University quote from above: "By arbitrarily gendering a universal loneliness, our fragmented society becomes further fractured, and the discourse surrounding relationships becomes a breeding ground for misogyny."

I think the US will be fine as long as we don't repeatedly elect some kind of cabal of pedophile authoritarians.

In the past, it was expected that men would have closer relationships with each other. Then we had the whole backlash against the hippie movement and it became "gay" and "bad" to swap handjobs with your bros in the basement den.

I believe you're misreading their posts. In the text that you quoted, they say, "I think f(X) and g(X) both exist. I think that X is actually two populations: Xa and Xb."

You've quoted this to say, "if you don't think g(X) exists then why did you post??"

(f(X) is men who want friendship, g(X) is men who want sex, Xa is men in feminist circles, Xb is men not in feminist circles.)

I don't mean to suggest that there's nothing to be done or that having society provide you with community is the solution. Just that it used to be that way and we're in a state of transition.

No one is depriving these people from joining the same organizations today

Right. But I'm saying that previously you were raised into an organization. You pretty much had no choice but to be a member of whatever group your family had been a member of. Now we've got a more free-form society and finding a group takes effort. And because you're not being forced to stay in by societal expectations, it even takes effort to stay with the group.